


The More I Do Love and Embrace My Bane

by akathecentimetre



Category: POKÉMON Detective Pikachu (2019), Pocket Monsters | Pokemon - All Media Types
Genre: Death Wish, Found Family, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Recovery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-04
Updated: 2019-08-17
Packaged: 2020-04-12 08:19:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 11,454
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19128163
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/akathecentimetre/pseuds/akathecentimetre
Summary: Things they don’t teach you at the police academy, #532: if you’ve earned the title of ‘legend,’ it’s almost certainly forvery badreasons.Luckily for Harry Goodman, he’s got the right people – and Pokémon – around him to bring him back from that brink.[Now with a second part from Tim's POV, and more Harry/Hide!]





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Dipping my toes in the Pokemon pool for the first time because a) oh man this movie did wonders for my inner child and b) I had never gotten the Ryan Reynolds Thing until that final scene and now _wow_ do I ever get the Ryan Reynolds Thing. Rating for language and delving a little deeper into the implications behind some of the film's heavier scenes/material; I've also sprinkled in a few touches of real-world/non-Pokemon culture etc.

*

Coming back into his body will forever be the strangest thing he will ever experience, and that includes the time when he’d been (briefly) swallowed by a Wailmer.

“Hey,” someone says, and then Pikachu totters sideways into Harry’s arm, and there are hands on his shaking wrists. “Hey, are you okay? C’mon, say something.”

He looks up, and _Oh, Tim, oh_ – he nods, as best as he can, feeling like he’s forgotten how to use his mouth, and where the hell has his tail gone, why is the tarmac so hard underneath him?

“Yeah,” Harry forces out, and then he tears off his beanie, runs his hands through his hair, feels himself looking wildly at the world from what seems like an unusually tall perspective. “Hi,” he croaks, and grins. “Hey, bud. You okay? Tell me you’re okay.”

“Of course I am,” Tim insists, his hands tight now around Harry’s upper arms, his eyes and smile and everything about his face open and wide. “Wow. Dad, seriously, are you okay? How are you feeling?”

“Like I’ve been run over by a garbage truck,” Harry slurs, and then the deep-tissue tear of every bruise he had ever apparently experienced as Pikachu throbs through his body and he pitches sideways, groaning, wondering why the world had turned into a kaleidoscope. “Let’s say a garbage truck that’s being driven by a Mr. Mime on R.”

“Ouch,” Tim nods, looking genuinely sympathetic, and then he’s hauling Harry gingerly to their collective feet, the equally woozy-looking bundle of fur that is Pikachu tucked into the crook of his neck. “Let’s get you to an ambulance, Dad.”

“No need,” Harry says, already feeling better for being vertical, as well as suddenly humming all over with the old delight of knowing there was somebody in the world to call him that. (Shit, had he really forgotten how good it felt?) “Let them take care of people who really need it – ”

“Nobody has needed a doctor that I’ve seen,” Tim grunts, tottering slightly under Harry’s helpless weight. “I think they’re all going to need some psychiatry, though.”

“Got that right,” Harry says, and through all the physical weakness he’s realizing that he’s downright giddy, like the hyperactivity he’d experienced in Pikachu’s body has all poured itself lovingly into worshipping the present moment.

There are shoves and shouts coming through the busy crowd, official-sounding yells and warnings as the PD and other City officials attempt to create or maintain some sort of order, and Harry loses track of things for a bit. He has a hand clenched in Pikachu’s fur over Tim’s shoulder, and lets his feet be led – until there is a bit of a clearance that emerges in the blur before his eyes, and when he blinks himself fully conscious again a familiar figure is shouldering his way towards them, a pink and seriously perturbed-looking Snubbull in his wake.

“My god,” Hide breathes, when he’s face-to-face with them, and his hands come up briefly in Harry’s direction before they drop again, his eyes wide and uncomprehending.

“Hey, boss,” Harry says, and doesn’t trust himself to add anything more.

Yoshida crushes them both into a long, desperate, bewildered hug, and Harry starts to think that maybe, just maybe –

***

_The first thing they **do** teach you at the police academy – ad nauseum, from the first hour and repeatedly, with all the force of a pair of brass knuckles to the temple – is that you don’t go to the police academy to fix yourself._

_Harry’s never been very good at following rules when it really matters, and he suspects he’s not the only one. Half of his incoming class are running from something; he’s not the only widower in his loosely-connected, frat-boyish group of orphans, divorcees, former criminals coming good, and has-beens. When half of them are cut free after the first week, he’s pretty sure the ones who have killed or saw someone die in their arms are the ones who have triumphed._

_He’d been out of the room when Tamila died, punching the front of a vending machine in the hospital lobby for daring to eat the two quarters he’d had left and give nothing in return. He doesn’t, then, he supposes, technically qualify to move on, but he manages to be ranked top of his cohort and knows he’s never going to consciously look back at the shadows that snap at his heels, looking like Tamila and sounding like Tim._

_They choose their Pokémon partners at the end of the first month. Harry carries out brief conversations with a Growlithe and a Delcatty before they, respectfully but with not a little bit of visible alarm in their small faces, turn him down. When he first looks at Pikachu, who looks just as skeptical about this whole process as Harry feels, the glance he gets back says something very clear and particular:_

_**What’chu looking at, punk?** _

_Harry laughs, despite himself, and sits down cross-legged, offering out an empty hand. ‘Right back at you, bud,’ he says quietly, and the Pikachu’s eyes light up with interest. ‘You’re one of my son’s favorites, you know.’_

_Pikachu inspects him up and down and all over, sniffing and poking and spending an inordinate amount of time pinching and staring into Harry’s face. It doesn’t look entirely pleased, and Harry can guess why, but the result of all the investigation – the little Pokémon’s clearly already taken on a lot of the PD creature training – is a sneeze, and a little nod, and when Harry, uncomfortable and wanting to poke a little bit of fun, buys a miniature deerstalker on their first walk home and plops it onto Pikachu’s head, it makes him ache to see it, too, accepted with nary a word._

_He puts his name and address into the hat a few days later, after Pikachu has finished thoroughly ransacking his apartment, and then they get to work._

_They bounce around a couple of departments, proving their mettle, before they end up in Yoshida’s division. The lieutenant is a good man: steady, reliable, reserved (it takes Harry six months to pry loose just the facts that he’s been with Snubbull for close to fifteen years, that he only drinks tea and not coffee when he needs caffeine – weirdo – and that his closest family are a sister and two twin nieces who enjoy throwing their beloved Uncle Hide to the metaphorical wolves of their identical Lillipups at every opportunity). He’s a good cop, and somehow manages to be everything Harry could ever have needed in this place and time._

_They’re doing good work, too, and his weekly phone calls to Tim haven’t yet degenerated into the monosyllabic, and so when he’s busy Harry can almost (almost) forget what he’s trying to fix, or run from. He and Pikachu are pretty good at finding missing people or providing the evidence needed to inquests of accidental or wrongful death. They’re **really** good at finding missing Pokémon – Ryme City’s most common crime or mishap – and the thrill he knows they both get from reuniting lost partners is worth any scrape they pick up along the way._

_And they do pick up some. The first occurs when they’re running full-tilt from a very nasty-looking trafficker and his equally-frightening Machamp, and manage to get stuck on the wrong side of an electric fence. Pikachu is fine, obviously, but Harry goes around for the next week shocking every object he touches, wide-eyed and jittering. Yoshida frowns at him, gives him a verbal caution, and they go back out._

_The next boss they track down is partnered with a Scyther, and they’re both nursing scrapes and deep, clean cuts in the nearest hospital when Hide finds them and throws the book at their stubborn heads. Three weeks of paperwork later, Harry drags himself home with a pounding headache only to find a nextdoor neighbor being robbed by the local Aipom gang. The bill for the dozens of fuseboxes that Pikachu fries in the course of their (successful) repulsion of the imps earns Harry a face-to-face dressing down._

_‘What exactly do you think you have to prove?’ Yoshida asks him, and this is what Harry has been dreading – the moment when someone beyond Pikachu would start to care in ways that mattered. ‘You may not realize this, Detective Goodman, but you are already looked up to by many in this department. You owe it to those around you, as well as yourself, to exercise some self-respect and caution.’_

_‘Piiii-ka,’ Pikachu sulks._

_‘Yeah, that,’ Harry sighs. ‘We’re getting results, lieutenant. I’d appreciate it if you stayed out of – whatever it is you think I’m doing, on a personal level.’_

_‘I think you’re trying to get yourself killed,’ Yoshida says sharply. ‘And I will not have that happen on my watch. Do you understand me, Detective Goodman?’_

_‘Harry,’ Harry says eventually, too dumbfounded to be coherent under triply penetrating stares from Hide, Pikachu, and Snubbull. ‘You should call me Harry.’_

_‘Well,’ Yoshida nods, his mouth a tight, unhappy line. ‘Take care of yourself, Harry, or I will personally see to it that you do.’_

_The calls with Tim get shorter, and it hurts. They bust a Pokémon fossil smuggling ring, and Harry celebrates by going out and tracking down a missing Golduck on two hours of sleep. He’s taken to staying in the Hi-Hat across the street from his apartment at all hours, letting a sleepy Pikachu cuddle into him in a booth and snore into his hip, communicating with the Ludicolo behind the bar in looks and whispers. If he’s not in the office, which frequently happens for days on end, he doesn’t end up talking to anyone except Pikachu, whom he would probably have to take to the grave with him to protect everything he’s said and sneered at himself in the night._

_Eight months in, Grams tells him, tentatively, that Tim doesn’t want to speak with him on that particular weekend day. So he goes to the Hi-Hat, and he gets incredibly drunk, and Pikachu’s frown deepens until his cheeks are sparking with repressed frustration. When Harry looks up from his glass at around 2 a.m. it’s to the sight of a long trenchcoat and double-breasted suit which – as Harry messily scoots over – announce Yoshida’s quiet arrival in the booth next to him._

_‘Hi, sir,’ Harry slurs. ‘What’s the occasion?’_

_‘Your Pokémon called me,’ Yoshida says, his face set in long lines of concern as Snubbull scrabbles up into the other side of the booth and begins apparently perusing the menu while actually glaring full-bore at Harry over the top of it. ‘He said I should come.’_

_‘You what?’ Harry asks, and when he looks at Pikachu the stare he gets back means all sorts of things, including **Of course I know how to use a phone, dick** , and **Don’t look at me like that** and **If you weren’t going to listen to me you had to listen to someone, he figured it out fast** as Pikachu goes back to his cup of lukewarm coffee._

_‘Traitor,’ Harry mumbles, and attempts to turn his blurry focus to Yoshida. ‘I’m fine, sir. I am. I’m off-duty and I can spend my money on whatever sort of poison I prefer – ’_

_‘Harry,’ Yoshida says, and just waits – and Harry breaks._

_‘I lost my wife,’ he gets out._

_‘Yes, I know.’_

_‘I’m losing my son,’ he chokes, and now he can barely breathe, and realizes only in retrospect that he spends the next twenty minutes wailing out what’s left of his heart into Yoshida’s chest, with his eyes, nose, and mouth pressed as deeply into fabric as he can in some last-ditch effort to stave off the indignity of being seen screaming aloud in public._

_Hide says things to him, as he starts to come out of it. Harry’s ubiquitous knit cap is in his hand, and he puts his palm on the side of Harry’s head, into his sweat-soaked hair. It’s more of the same that he’s heard over the months of praise for his closed cases, about how strong Harry is, about how well-loved he is at work, about how brilliant he could be if he just toed the line, and – not now, not for a long time, but in the moment of utter release and exhaustion as he releases his hold on Yoshida’s collar and leans himself, wobbling, back into the booth, he thinks that maybe, someday, he’d allow himself to believe it._

_Hide takes him home, and stays hovering in the door to Harry’s bedroom as Harry stumbles his way out of his clothes and pets Pikachu clumsily on the head for having helped unlace his boots. He doesn’t see Hide go, but he definitely hears a sarcastic-soft ‘Chu’ as he crawls under the covers in his boxers and a t-shirt, letting the lieutenant know that Harry’s safe from harm until he wakes, at least._

_He sleeps, and he gets up, and they do it all over again. Day after day, scar after scar. It’s what they’re – it’s what **he’s** good at. Maybe the only thing, anymore._

***

They keep him and Pikachu under observation at Ryme City Central Hospital for two days before they’re allowed to go home, and then he checks his voicemails, takes a deep breath, and goes to the train station whose lines pass through Leaventown. Tim surprises him, again, in the best possible way, and they’re back in the Hi-Hat before Harry has really had a chance to process what the hell has just happened to his life, with Tim laughing at Pikachu’s antics on the bartop as he teases the long-suffering Ludicolo. They go shopping; they refresh the furniture in Tim’s room, they box up the old memorabilia, and Tim comes home from having registered for the Academy flushed and happy, and with a new copy of the current _Pokémon Trainers’ Monthly_ in his bag underneath the paperwork.

Harry sleeps, a lot, and remembers that no, he does not actually have the furious metabolism of an electric mouse, and re-learns how to eat, what to drink, how to remember to put his glasses on first thing in the morning, and how to not sleep curled in a ball with his nose tucked under his toes. Tim uses his final bonus from the insurance company – a parting gift, his old boss had said, and Harry swells with pride even at this meagre sign of favor – to buy them both a Nespresso machine and a hundred pods, and tells Harry he has to make them last a month. He might be more competent at being an adult, and/or a bastard, than Harry had ever realized.

It’s a perfect summer morning, warmly pleasant, when he finally shrugs on clothes that are suitable for more than just shuttling back and forth across the building and the street in view only of his neighbors and makes his way back to Police Headquarters. Pikachu darts alongside him in the sun, dashing from one patch of shade to the next, and smiles his adorable, excited smile up and back at Harry as they enter the lobby, quickly running to say hello – in proper Pokémon fashion, finally – to all of his friends in the break-room while Harry makes his way upstairs.

Hide is alone in his office, and, like every other officer who is currently barricaded in their cubicles in the bullpen outside, looks to be plowing through absolute mountains of paperwork. Harry can’t imagine what form could reasonably be used to report the crime of human-Pokémon soul merging, but he was pretty sure that whatever piece of paper they’d come up with had been duplicated into the hundreds of thousands, maybe even the millions, by Howard Clifford’s antics at the parade. Suddenly, taking in the creases of exhaustion at the corners of Yoshida’s eyes, Harry can’t help but feel a pang of distant, irrational guilt.

He knocks on the door, and Hide looks up, severely nettled before he recognizes Harry and his expression softens. “Harry. Come in.”

He’s already looked back down at his work by the time Harry settles gingerly across from him, though his pen is no longer moving. “How is your recovery going?”

“Fine,” Harry says carefully, wondering – and again, forcing down a pang of selfishness – at why he feels so worried by the realization that Hide has never given him anything less than his full, dedicated attention before. “You look, uh – pissed?”

“I am _pissed_ ,” Hide says, slowly, not looking up, with that particular emphasis which tells Harry that he doesn’t approve of using the word and yet will if it’ll convey his mood through Harry’s thick skull. “I am pissed at _many_ things.”

“O-kay. Feel like enlightening me?”

Hide’s lips purse, and when he finally looks up at Harry Harry’s not sure if he’s ever seen him this serious. It even beats the reaction he’d been given after the Curious Incident of the Houndoom in the Nighttime. Which, for the record, had not been entirely his fault.

“I am pissed,” Hide says flatly, “about my Pokémon’s personhood being violated by some billionaire’s ideas and playthings. That was not meant to be done. It was as unnatural as he thought it was right.”

Harry tilts his head sideways so he can see Snubbull, who is sleeping peacefully in his basket, his tongue flapping out by an ear and seemingly none the worse for wear. “Agreed, but – ”

“I am _pissed_ ,” Hide continues, cutting Harry off with a sharp wave of a hand, “about the fact that you violated City protocol in taking on detective work outside of your remit with the police. You could be _charged_ for that, Harry, and then what will Tim be left with? And for that matter, what the hell do you think you were doing assuming you were capable of capturing _Mewtwo?_ ”

“Aw, c’mon, man – ”

“ – and I am _pissed_ ,” Hide says again, his volume rising, and this is what makes Harry shut up, because that never happens “ – about the fact that Howard Clifford used our own investigative tools against us to make it look like you were _dead_ , and I didn’t figure it out!”

“Oh.” Harry sits there, surprising himself at how stunned he feels, how much he wishes he was out on the street _actually_ being run over by a garbage truck this time, as he sees the faint glint of tears at the corners of Hide’s eyes.

“Well,” he tries, eventually. “Yeah. That’s fucked up. You’d better – I don’t know, get I.T. on that shit. Make sure there aren’t any back doors left into the RCPD system?”

“I’ve already given the order,” Hide says, nettled, looking down again as he rubs in exasperation at his forehead. “And I have a meeting tomorrow with Roger Clifford and his people to try to persuade him to give up his family’s political hold over the City for long enough that we can regain some independence in the precincts.”

“Wow,” Harry says, genuinely dismayed. “That’s going to suck. I’d recommend you bring along some EMTs to deal with the – you know, the massive boredom and inevitable disappointment.”

“I’m sorry, Harry,” Hide sighs, quieter. “I should have realized. I went out to the scene myself – I should have realized you would never have just vanished. I should have looked harder, for your sake – I promised you for Tim’s once – ”

“Just what do you think you could have _done?_ ” Harry says, earnest and seething at the idea that anyone should have taken his troubles onto their shoulders. “Mewtwo showed up, I got disintegrated into a freakin’ soul-bond – there was nothing for you to find. No drag marks, no Pikachu. I was in the best place left to me.”

“I should have – ”

“What, you were going to go tramping into the woods in search of that – thing, if you had had the footage?” Harry laughs, and there’s something cold creeping up on him, too, the sort of realization he’s taken pains to avoid in the past week. “Mewtwo saved my life. I was in bad shape, and if Howard’s people had caught up with me I was good as dead. They had no qualms about having their Pokémon throw me off a bridge – at _best_ , I would have ended up as a sad excuse for a lab rat in one of their tanks. I’m _here_ , Hide.”

He smiles at the truth of it despite himself, and for the first time, it feels, since he entered the room, Yoshida glances up and seems to truly see him. “I’m here. I made it.”

There’s a long pause, one which Harry almost finds comfortable, before Hide looks up at him, with a small, tired return of that glance he’s turned on Harry so often, that _You bastard, you’re turning me grey_ sort of look.

“You’ve finally gotten rid of that horrible hat,” he says, unexpectedly, with a small twitch of his hand in the direction of Harry’s head. “You look more like yourself without it.”

“Yeah,” Harry says, and feels safe enough to smile himself. “I think I was tired of hiding. Besides, Tim needs to know what I actually look like.”

“If you’re going to turn me down, Harry,” Hide says, softly, “I would ask that you do it now.”

Harry stops breathing, and just stares, and tells himself not to move a fucking muscle. He _would_ screw this up by accident, he would, he _would_ , and so he just sits there and watches, wide-eyed, until Hide’s own look, careful and assessing, relaxes, and the lieutenant seems to allow himself the faintest hint of a smile.

“See you tomorrow, then,” he says, looking back down at his papers. “You’ll be working support for the trafficking desk in the short term. Give my regards to Tim.”

Harry scarpers, almost scrambling, and feels like he needs to run out into the sunshine yelling and whooping at the top of his lungs. He settles for chasing Pikachu at full-tilt through a local park, dodging the playful, hyperactive sparks of lightning that get thrown back into his path, and wondering what the hell he did to deserve any of this forgiveness.

***

_One year to the day after Tamila’s death, Harry stops wearing his wedding ring. He puts it into a drawer of his bedside table and consciously tries to forget that it’s there, gradually piling scraps of paper and other bits of random apartment detritus on top of it until it disappears from his sight, until he’s sure that it must be buried in a far back corner of that drawer and gathering dust._

_He hasn’t given her up, of course – he just needs to give himself a break from remembering. A break from catching sight of it at unexpected moments and feeling like he’s been punched in the lung. A break from thinking that she’d disapprove of everything he is, now, because she would._

_He’s getting worse, and he’s not sure he wants to fix it._

_Not at work, though. Work is fan-fucking-tastic. They give him awards. He gets more used to collaring the big guns, the ones who would be the final boss battle in a videogame. Pikachu, when they need to, brings the swagger. Every once in a while, they blow off steam in places like the Roundhouse, like the underground gyms, whooping their way to victory. He’s made enemies, dangerous ones, and he’s also secure in the knowledge that they will never be able to touch him, the Ryme PD’s most decorated detective. He turns the living room of the apartment into a situation room on weekends, tracking down leads, calling reporters and informants on burner phones as Pikachu rustles through folders, scattering reports in his wake._

_He’s so good at it, and he’s getting worse. Now, when they face death, it’s the sort of danger that would obliterate them to the point where they wouldn’t even find a body. The sorts of criminals who would drop them off of a pier tied to a Golem, or leave them to die in a slow-filling sewer while Raticates waited to eat the meat off of their dead bones._

_Fewer bruises and scrapes, more threat of oblivion – and he thinks he likes it._

_He’s sent Tim five birthday cards without reply by the time he and Pikachu next end up in an emergency room. He wakes up groaning and trying to turn over into himself, only to realize that it’s a stupidly bad idea as the burn tissue on his stomach stretches and rips. Next to him, in a little incubator, Pikachu is sleeping soundly, his fur singed but his cheeks red and healthy, letting out little sighs of oxygen-boosted contentment – and in the plastic chair across from their beds is, of course, Hide, his coat neatly folded over his knees as he pauses in scratching at whatever dispensation for Harry’s idiocy he’d had to fill out this time in his lap._

_‘Wh’happened?’_

_‘Campbell’s Magmar,’ Yoshida says succinctly. ‘It was guarding the depot you were investigating. It’s in custody.’_

_“Oh, good,’ Harry sighs, reaching out his hand that isn’t taped up with a stent and reaching through one of the access ports to the incubator so he can stroke a finger along one of Pikachu’s paws. ‘Is Campbell on the run?’_

_‘We found him the next morning. He’s been charged with attempted murder.’_

_‘It feels like he succeeded,’ Harry hisses, and as he turns again onto his back and settles he grins hard, his eyes pinched closed towards the ceiling. ‘Got him, the bastard.’_

_‘Would your family think it was worth it?’_

_Harry doesn’t open his eyes, and thinks that this sick, rising nausea is not down to the influence of whatever it is they’ve got pumping into him from the IV at his side. ‘What did you say?’_

_‘Do you think your wife, or your son, or anyone else you have left, would think it was worth it for you to throw yourself away on a two-bit illegal breeder working out of the Docks?’_

_It hurts when he hurls himself to sitting upright – it’s agony, in fact – but Harry doesn’t care as he takes in, with pleasure, the shock in Yoshida’s face as he snarls, transforming from hard, stern care to a mask of unfamiliar panic._

_‘None. Of your. Fucking. Business,’ he grits out, feeling feral, like he would order Pikachu to blow up the room at the slightest further provocation._

_The sickness swells and bites at the back of his throat._

_‘I’m sorry.’ Hide is holding up his empty hands towards Harry in a gesture of supplication and submission, his face open and sorrowful – and just like that, the rage dissipates, replaced by a roaring pain in Harry’s abdomen. ‘I’m sorry, Harry. I apologize.’_

_Harry falls back, wheezing, and, as he slips back into a grey haze, miserably puts another mark next to his tally of things he will probably never forgive himself for._

***

He’s back at it far sooner than he intended, and it’s all the worse now for knowing beyond a doubt that he’s in the wrong. Tim is still in the opening stages of his Academy training, cloistered within the bowels of Headquarters for twelve hours a day, when Harry and Pikachu first sneak their way back into the Docks in pursuit of some of the fugitive Greninjas that had escaped into the wilds from Howard’s lab. They are half-feral, driven by fear and hunger and far more powerful than they have any right to be, and by the time they’ve knocked enough of them unconscious to get them scattered or into protective Pokéballs Harry has one of their stars in his shoulder and another in the back of his calf, setting him limping, and Pikachu is in his arms, whimpering, with tiny silvered shards of them sticking into him like he’s a pincushion. Tim grounds them both for a week, which Harry finds both hilarious and horrifying, and he’s on the couch on the fourth day of their medical leave with Pikachu on his lap, stealing dumplings out of their takeaway carton right under his nose, when Hide calls.

“ _You have to stop_.”

“I know,” Harry sighs.

“ _Honestly, Harry, you really have to – wait, what did you say_?”

“All your dreams are coming true,” Harry says, quieter, laughing despite himself. “I know. Tim deserves better.”

 _So do you_ , he thinks. He doesn’t say it out loud, but there’s a relief, there’s a downright _joy_ to the sound of Hide’s long, answering sigh which gives Harry hope that he’s been understood nonetheless.

“ _I’m glad to hear it_ ,” Hide says eventually. “ _We look forward to having you back_.”

He gets himself together, and the next time he’s in the Docks he takes backup: a young junior detective named Jim who’s nervous as all get out but whose Chikorita is a dab hand with restraining techniques. Harry gets home before ten, allows himself a brief moment of disappointment, and then, laughing to himself, goes to bed. Pikachu is humming and chattering as he snuggles down on Harry’s second pillow, and it’s – good. Different, but definitely good.

There’s a stakeout, a week later, when he’s been crouched down in an alleyway for a good six hours and is losing feeling in his fingers and toes – Pikachu took refuge inside his jacket ages ago – and he’s bored as hell, when he thinks his number’s finally been drawn, because the dark sky above him is suddenly shimmering and full of unnatural light, and when Pikachu throws up an instinctive Thunderbolt it’s batted away like it’s nothing.

Mewtwo floats down beside them as Harry swears and blinks rapidly, trying to clear his eyes of this sudden blindness, catching his breath at the sight of the psychic waves distorting everything around him.

 ** _Hello, Harry Goodman_** , Mewtwo think-says, formally. _**You are looking well**_ ** _._**

“Yeah,” Harry says, gasping, sitting quickly upright, his back pressed hard into the crumbling brick alley wall and keeping his hands on the quivering pile of shrinking fur that is Pikachu in his lap. “So – so are you?”

Mewtwo doesn’t laugh – Harry’s not even sure it can, physiologically – but the sense of amusement that washes over them both is unmistakeable. **_And doing better, I see. What has changed?_**

Harry tries not to think too hard about all of the many implications of that, because he’s already spent too many of his hours off being creeped the fuck out by the fact that his consciousness, his very existence, had been processed through the equivalent of a humanity-hating supercomputer in the body of a mutant Mew. “I think I – ” he starts, and has to stop and clear his throat. “I think I started remembering what was important.”

 ** _You have far to go, still,_** Mewtwo says. Its voice is all around Harry, in the air, resonating through his bones. **_I have an interest in seeing you succeed, Harry Goodman. Do not fail me._**

Harry thinks about how it had felt to have the Master Ball in his hand, the thrill of it, wondering whether he’d go down in history either for catching Mewtwo or being the first to be killed by it in over two decades, and a laugh bubbles up out of his chest. “Am I _your_ test subject, now?”

 ** _I may feel the urge to run my own experiments, yes,_** Mewtwo says slyly, and then, with a flash of light and flight, it is gone.

“Pika-PI!” Pikachu screeches, the frantic, terrified equivalent of _And stay out!_ , and then he buries himself into Harry, paws scratching and gripping until it pinches and Harry has to complain – never about that fear, though. Never about that brief, brilliant second of thinking everything was going to end. It makes him feel sick, that instant, like the lack of it used to.

He calls in to the surveillance perimeter that he’s seen nothing, and clocks out of his shift. When he gets home Tim is still awake, poring over schedules and bus timetables, and – when Harry is already half-asleep – shyly asks whether, in his (their) off hours, Harry wouldn’t mind going with him to a weekend tournament or two outside of the City.

He agrees quickly, and can’t fall asleep for hours. His face hurts from smiling.

***

_There is blood in his mouth, thick with bits of him he’s pretty sure should not actually be in his mouth, and **fuck** but it hurts. Glass under his arms, under his wrists, safety glass not so fucking safe embedded in his palms; dragging himself out, breathing fire, thinking oh, god, it feels like the ground is made of barbed wire the way the gravel digs into him. There’s bone coming through his skin, somewhere, and he’s irrevocably delirious with it all, thinking **what** and **why** and **who am I** because nothing that’s left of him feels like it could once have been a coherent piece of Harry Goodman –_

He jerks awake, his arms flailing in panic as a strangled yell rips from his throat, and Pikachu, flung with a startled squeak over the edge of the bed by the sudden movement of the quilt, reappears in an instant onto Harry’s lap, his cheeks crackling with distress.

Harry feels no shame, none whatsofuckingever, in burying his hands and face into Pikachu’s fur and forgetting about everything besides breathing. For a while, at least.

An hour later he still can’t talk, and he knows he’s in trouble. He’s gotten up; taken hundreds of unsteady steps around the living room with Pikachu on his shoulder, trying to massage out the phantom pains of the crash; he tries coffee; he tries looking at all the recent pictures he’s taken of Tim and Lucy, grinning and young and so very giddy, on his phone; he tries watching two minutes of an old boilerplate noir from the ‘40s before he can’t take it anymore.

Tim’s in Leaventown, picking up the last of the stuff he’s going to bring to Ryme to help him settle in, and that’s the only thing which has allowed Harry the freedom to leave his room at all. He also knows that he’s not going to be able to shake this by the time Tim gets back, mid-morning, and that that moment – of trying to rearrange his face, of trying to pretend it’s all okay –

– he’s not capable of that. Not right now, and maybe not ever again.

Pikachu’s eyes are wide and sad and so very loving as he watches Harry get dressed, doing his laces up the wrong way and putting on his t-shirt back to front. _You want to come?_ Harry thinks, not ready for real speech yet; Pikachu knows (because he always knows), and he gives Harry a dirty look which says _Look, pal, even in this state, you gotta know that you’re stuck with me._

 _Asshole_ , that look says, ever-so gently.

Harry keeps him tucked into his jacket during the taxi ride, letting them breathe in time together, and by the time he fetches up at the door to Hide’s apartment he’s regained just enough calm to think that maybe he hadn’t needed this, hadn’t been desperate for it for a long time – but then Hide opens the door, half-awake, with his work shirt open at the collar and wrists, and Harry is paralyzed.

 _Hi,_ he thinks, nonsensically, as Hide’s gaze sharpens. _So, I guess I need to start with an apology for being an enormous dickwad. Yeah, that first. And then I’ll try to maybe somehow convey that I’m kind of fucked up, and I’m a father again, so it seems like a really stupid idea to keep on dying bit by bit given that I kind of actually died for a while there (oh gods, I need so much therapy, did I mention that therapy’s at the very top of the list?), and for some reason some part of me thinks that this is my next stop on the road to getting better and I might love you man so hey do you happen to have an air mattress or something I could crash on until I’m sane again?_

“Hide,” he tries to say. His voice cracks like he’s suddenly thirteen again, so he stops – and Hide just takes his hand, tugs him inside, folds him down onto his immaculate couch and puts him to sleep.

He wakes up in the pale morning light with Pikachu and Snubbull curled around his socked feet, letting out their little cooing snores, breathing in the last tendril of incense from the Buddhist shrine Hide keeps in the corner. There is a hand in his hair and another draped over his shoulder; Hide is asleep too, above and below and around him, and Harry can’t remember the last time he felt this warm.

***

Not everything is perfect with Tim, at first. Even in the first sweep of joy that had born Harry away with it after coming back to himself and that moment at the train station, some distant, vaguely rational part of his brain had reminded him that parenthood was never easy, even when the child was grown and capable and he was out of practice enough that they could build entirely new lives around each other. Another part of Harry wants to be greedy over Tim’s attention; that gets slapped down almost immediately the first time Tim comes home late, smiling to himself and daydreaming, after having spent the day getting to know Ryme better with Lucy. Yet another part wants to turn into a raging, slavering Ursaring any time even the smallest hackle of alarm is raised about Tim’s safety, if he comes home from DP boot camp with an unlucky bruise or grumbling about someone hurrying through their day who happened to be rude to him, still a Ryme outsider. _That_ impulse dies a sad, withering sort of death when the proof of Harry’s eyes shows him that Tim is no longer a toddler, no longer shorter than him – not by much, anyway – no longer skinny like growing kids always look, with their bones sharp and sticking out in all directions.

What he remembers of Tim is distant and fading as new memories are rapidly built, headily, both their worlds having changed overnight. And that wasn’t counting everything _else_ which came with suddenly having a roommate who was at once as familiar as anyone could be, and a total stranger. The passive-aggressive argument that ensued over who got first crack at the shower in the morning went on for _weeks_ before they finally flipped a coin over it.

He notices, though, the slow-ramping tension which is rising in Tim as the first three weeks of his training slip away, and the end of the first month approaches. He knows what that means, and so, he knows, does Pikachu, who spends more time than has been strictly useful in that fourth week with Tim. They play together; Pikachu makes him laugh when he skitters across the countertop with a large knife held precariously in his little paws, which Harry doesn’t quite find funny, as though he’s disapproving through a layer of uncertain dreams.

When the day finally comes, he’s stern with himself and doesn’t pull strings to get out of the night-op preceding it; he and Pikachu get their man (or rather woman, in this case, because Ryme is nothing if not an equal-opportunity place when it comes to crime), set free a few dozen captured Wingulls, pointing them vaguely in the direction of the nearest salt-water ocean, and then drag themselves back home to fall into bed just as the sun is rising. By the time Harry’s woken up, in the early afternoon, he’s alone in his bedroom and Pikachu is out in the living room somewhere, chasing something else which sounds equally small and squeaky.

He makes himself a cup of coffee, and meanders into the family room (he’s started to call it that lately, and he likes it) with his mug to find Pikachu and a small, barely-grown Pichu chasing each other furiously around the desk, chittering and chu-ing like there’s no tomorrow. Tim is sitting on the floor in the midst of the chaos, looking stunned, but Harry recognizes it for what it is – evidence of the bond that he’d realized could only, and sometimes not even then, be overtaken by the birth of a child or sibling. It’s turned Tim boneless and worn out with relief, and Harry only manages to coax him far enough to lie down on the couch before he falls asleep that night with the Pichu, who has large, intelligent eyes and bites Harry when he tries to approach Tim the first couple of times, curled up at the nape of his neck.

Things get, if it’s possible, even busier after that. Harry snatches father-son time with Tim when he can, and finds himself less upset than he expected by the idea that, unlike the beginning of their – admittedly odd – new relationship, they can cope with not orbiting around each other at all times. Harry’s got his work, he’s got his home, he’s got his son and his Pokémon and his city and Hide –

Yeah, Hide. He has to come clean about that, he knows, and he’s fucking dreading it for all of the usual drab, boring, cowardly reasons; in the end, though, it happens mostly by accident, during the usual coffee break he and Tim have started to take in the late morning every Thursday, when Hide’s name and photo show up on the screen of Harry’s phone and, when he’s done rejecting the call – Hide will understand, because he knows nothing gets to interrupt Coffee Hour – and he only realizes when he looks up again that Tim, aspiring detective, and his entirely too-smart Pokémon are both looking at him very carefully, and he realizes that they’d seen what always happened to Harry’s face, now, when anything at all to do with Hide happened during his day.

“Was that Yoshida?”

“Yep,” Harry says, pocketing the phone as he balances his takeaway coffee precariously in his other hand. “He can wait. He says hi. I mean – I know he always wants me to tell you hi.”

“So, uh – are you and the lieutenant – ?” Tim asks, with a little suggestive shrug, and that’s when Harry manages to slop a large amount of espresso down the front of his shirt as his hand squeezes involuntarily around the little paper cup. It’s undignified, and it kind of burns, but he ignores it best he can because damn it, this is important. And definitely not the time to do what he usually does in oversharing the menial details, like how freakin’ hot it had been to figure out the delicate arrangements of sex in the workplace. That, he knows, is Not For Children To Hear.

(The first attempt had involved him getting very well acquainted with Hide’s desk, and would probably keep Harry nightmare-free for – oh, he’d guess about six months, for starters.)

“Sometimes,” he says, carefully. “Yeah. We’ve been – well, he’s been a big part of my life for a long time, now.”

Tim nods slowly, considering. “Okay.”

“Yeah?” Harry ekes out, letting loose a breath he hadn’t realized he was holding. “You know, you – you’re the only one who has the right to tell me that it isn’t okay. And you should. If – if you think it isn’t,” he finishes lamely.

 _Fuck_ , he thinks, helplessly, and remembers Tamila, unbidden: the gentle, loving tease she’d drop on the both of them when he and Tim had been arguing over bedtime, both stubborn and huffing and driving each other crazy. _Save me_ , she’d laughed, _from the emotional constipation of a Goodman. You’re all as hopeless as each other._

“No,” Tim says, and though Harry knows that the tension has only started to lessen in him and the watchful Pichu – that it hasn’t gone away entirely – he’s definitely going to take this for a win. “No, it’s fine. I’m… glad you have someone, Dad.”

Harry’s subsumed relief feels amazing – until Pikachu hops up on the table between them and starts fucking _gossiping_ with Pichu, and Pichu’s eyes go wide and its mouth drops open and then they both give him a look that makes him feel like he’s being told off by his _own_ grandmother and it is really _really_ not fair.

And then he says most of that out loud. Pikachu blows a raspberry at him; Tim laughs, high and warm and so very generous, and Harry, with the steam of what had been a really nice espresso wafting up from his shirt, thinks that maybe, just maybe, everything is right with the world.

*

**FIN**

*****

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (I am genuinely confused about Yoshida’s name, I get that the fandom calls him Hideo and I definitely thought that was his name as I was coming out of the theatre but the IMDB/Wiki info all says Hide?!? Whatever, I’m happy to be corrected...)
> 
> Title from Spenser's _Amoretti_ sonnet cycle, #47. Thank you for reading!


	2. Chapter 2

*

“Tim.” There’s something tapping his face, sharply, and his first instinct is to scrunch up his forehead, swat at it, and whine for five more minutes. “Tim, wake up.”

There’s a grey ceiling above him when he does, and fluorescent light, and a large, stern-looking blur which starts to solidify into the equally stern-looking Lieutenant Yoshida. Which is weird.

“There you are,” Yoshida sighs, and his expression softens a little out of its concern. “Stay put for a moment, get your bearings. I need to inspect the rest of this room.”

Tim groans, puts a hand out to the side and rolls onto it so he can push himself up. His head’s pounding like a Loudred has taken up residence in his ear canals – and it’s then that he sees Pichu, fur tousled, curled into a limp little half-moon on the concrete floor, and next to him is Snubbull in an equally unconscious state, and _oh fuck_ that can’t be good.

“Be careful sitting up,” Yoshida says to the side of him, and Tim looks sluggishly over to see that the lieutenant, his jacket discarded and laid over the sleeping Snubbull, is looking closely over the walls and corners of what appears to be the underground storage room they’re trapped in. “The sedative may make you nauseous.”

“Sedative?” Tim asks, his tongue thick in his mouth. “They got us with a sedative? Last thing I remember is being out on patrol in A quadrant.”

“Yes, well, we are definitely not there anymore,” Yoshida says as he comes back to Tim and, sitting down cross-legged, hands Tim what looks like an animal tranquilizer dart more suited to open plains than a police operation, in the seediest neighborhood Ryme City has to offer, to take down the headquarters of a specialized Pokémon smuggling ring. “Our only escape route seems to be up there, which we cannot reach,” Yoshida continues, pointing to what Tim thinks must be the underside of a manhole cover, smack-dab in the center of the ceiling. “So, we shall wait.”

“Okay,” Tim says, scooping up Pichu – the little sigh of subconscious contentment his partner lets loose is comforting, though Tim would definitely prefer it if it was awake – and tucking it gently into the folds of his own police-issue uniform jacket.

 _Trapped underground with my dad’s boyfriend-boss. Well, this is awkward,_ a voice in his head says, as Yoshida settles back into the wall next to him.

And then another voice says _Is it, though?_

*

To be fair, Tim had noticed pretty early – right when he’d seen the new box of tea.

His dad was nothing if not a menace in his perpetually-messy kitchen (Pikachu was somehow worse, which made the memory of the attempted knife-play all the more disturbing), but he did have some identifiable habits, including a particular overhead cupboard, tall and narrow, which housed all of the necessities for the brewing and delivery of various forms of caffeine. Harry’s coffee diet, before Tim showed up, seemed to have consisted of close to a dozen nearly-empty jars of instant espresso powder, with, tucked into various nooks and crannies, the occasional treat of a drip-pod, a bag of whole beans from Turkey which had to have been a gift, and, nearly invisible in a back corner, an unwrapped box of green tea-bags that released a cloud of dust as Tim pulled it out, searching for anything that wouldn’t be so strong as to make him think he was hallucinating at six a.m.

So it was a palpable difference, a few weeks after Tim had officially moved in, to notice not only that the old (and apparently expired, Tim didn’t even know that was _possible_ with tea) box of bags had turned up in the trashcan under the sink, but that there was a new, fresh box of them that had taken their place, pulled right to the front of the cabinet. And then Yoshida came over after work one evening, and Harry waved Tim off from taking the cup of steaming ginseng to the lieutenant, saying absentmindedly that it needed a few more minutes to steep to Hide’s liking, and he would bring it into the living room himself –

– well, he _might_ have known right then. Or he started paying a heck of a lot more attention, at least, and it rapidly became very obvious.

He learned a lot of things, almost too many things, in those first few weeks of living with his dad, in keeping with the rest of the incredible mindfuck that had been coming to Ryme City in the first place. First among them was adjusting to the personality newly restored to his father’s body, which – and this was the real kicker – _wasn’t_ actually like what Pikachu had been like. Something about the metabolism, looks and powers of an electric mouse had given his dad an energy which was now – well, Tim wouldn’t say lacking, but it sure as hell is different. His dad _is_ a caffeine addict, _is_ impulsive and incredibly intuitive, _is_ prone to just blurting out emotional truthbombs and is reeling his way back into understanding what it is to have a family again, and Tim knows it’s going to take a long time before they ever have a helpful conversation about what Pikachu had said about hurting everyone. He _isn’t_ , however, as downright rude as a human. He’s not as reckless, though Tim suspects he might have been, once; he visibly thinks through everything Tim says to him, and, when it’s important, skips the wisecracks and considers his replies. He’s got human cares and human worries that Tim thinks he’d actively (if unconsciously) left behind when he’d woken up to find his eyesight ten inches from the ground that he’s surprisingly reserved about, and about which Tim, despite himself, wants to know everything.

He finds himself sensitive to the noises and lights of Ryme in those first few weeks, too, which means he’s often awake in the night, getting used to his new bed, getting used to the odd routines which seem to be the life in store for him as a detective, too – the scratchings of pens and pencils as Harry is working into the early hours of the morning, the mumbled conversations on the phone with informants around a mouthful of cereal at a weird hour of the afternoon. Pikachu catnaps and skitters around and into furniture at _all_ hours, its hyperactive, cheerful personality meaning there’s never a dull moment.

Tim knows his dad has nightmares, because he thinks he hears them, sometimes, but he doesn’t ask – especially once he asks Harry about Yoshida, and in the dumbfounded, espresso-stained look his dad gives him in their sunny spot in the RCDP Plaza, he sees a spark of relief that he almost feels guilty to have been the cause of.

His dad has had his own life for ten years, and even with all the horrendous baggage that comes with that truth Tim’s old enough, now (and he hopes mature enough), to understand that that’s okay. _He’s_ got his own life too, his own dreams, his own relationship with Lucy to think of, and a whole fuckton of trepidation that he doesn’t want to lay on anyone else. So if Harry has a friend who means as much to him as Pikachu did, briefly, to Tim, or as much as Lucy is rapidly becoming – he can be fine with that. He certainly _wants_ to be, and he thinks that’s a decent start.

Yoshida starts turning up more often after that, though not overtly so. Tim comes home from his brain-draining training sometimes to find the lieutenant sitting on the couch next to his dad, their reports spread out in front of them and carrying out long, detailed, expletive-ridden (from Harry) discussions about how they were going to nail down a particular Pokémon smuggler who happened to have an obscenely expensive lawyer and the ability to wipe security tapes. Tim runs into Yoshida at Police Headquarters, in the hallways or as he’s staggering his way home; there’s one training session on police bureaucracy which Yoshida himself teaches, which, despite the subject matter, Tim manages to find helpful to the point of being fascinating. On another occasion, Yoshida, with the calm, practice ease of someone who has worked with Pokémon all their adult life, picks Pichu up out of Tim’s arms and, with gentle hands and a low, soothing voice, gives it a quick inspection, all while Pichu, semi-alarmed, can’t seem to bring itself to bite him. When he gives it back to Tim, his praise is warm and heartfelt and everything Tim finds incredible about the new thrill he gets out of being complimented by Harry.

Mostly, though, he realizes that he’s – well, it sounds strange to even think it, but he’s proud of his dad. For having someone like this, for making no bones about it, for being as casual as can be about it with Tim without having it do something weird to whatever sort of father-son Thing they’re trying to do, now. Yoshida drinks his tea, shakes hands hello and goodbye with Tim, laughs at Pikachu’s and Pichu’s antics, quietly scolds Snubbull to not be so grumpy around his new friends; he’s never said a word about what a fucking mess Tim had been back in those horrifying moments when they’d been in Hide’s office, stumbling through the fact’s of Harry’s ‘death.’ Tim sees, as though he’s still an outsider, how Harry physically looks to Yoshida for confirmation, for affirmation, for reinforcement on his ideas and his theories and plans, and how happy his dad is to get them, and it’s – nice.

It’s what he imagines – or rather, what he hopes – he could have, and that’s a surprise that just keeps on giving.

Yoshida spends the night only once in those early months of Tim’s settling into Ryme and blitzing (if he says so himself) through the training program, and he’s pretty sure it’s by accident: he’s hazily awake one night after getting home from a very late movie with Lucy – because it turns out that junior reporters- and detectives-in-training have literally no time for anything that could remotely resemble dating between the hours of 7am and 10pm – and only remembers as he swims back to consciousness that Yoshida had been there when he’d yawned his way in, standing at Harry’s shoulder as they worked over a laptop together, and it seems he hadn’t left. There are minor scuffling noises in the hall – sounds of protest, and what Tim thinks must be Harry whispering _Come on – no, c’mon, it’s late –_ before he’s out again.

When he gets up in the morning it’s to the sight of Snubbull, apparently unperturbed, snoring (and drooling copiously) on the couch, its tongue lolling out of its mouth; Pichu is busying itself by diving into the half-open bag of Pokémon food someone left on the kitchen counter, and the only sign that anything has changed is that the door to Harry’s room is closed, and Pikachu, pouting and coming close to yowling, is scratching furiously at the bottom edge of it as though he’s an exiled cat, the knob handle far above him out of reach. Tim takes pity on him after a while, because it’s way too early for this sort of ruckus, and opens the door for him – and, as Pikachu scampers in triumphantly, sees exactly what he’d expected to see: his dad, face-down and snoring fit to wake the dead, undisciplined and sprawling, while Yoshida, still mostly in his work clothes, is sleeping in a perfect corpse pose next to him. Harry’s got an arm tossed messily across Yoshida’s waist, and Tim, as he quietly retreats, thinks that there’s a heck of a lot about all of this that makes sense.

*

He knows it won’t last, but for the first stretch of their strange captivity Tim almost finds it relaxing.

He’s been tired, this last month. Transitioning from training into fieldwork and constabulary shifts on the streets of Ryme had provided him with an entirely new understanding not just of the wonders and perfect nooks and crannies of the city he’d newly chosen to call home, but also of just how fucking shitty people, and Pokémon, could be to each other. And stopping petty crimes on the sidewalks had just been one stream of activity to keep straight; his training of Pichu was a constant, all-encompassing, all-consuming task which was teaching him things he’d never even imagined could be learned. And _then_ there were his tentative forays into battle-training, traveling outside the City with his dad on weekends to find the nearest legitimate gyms; he and Pichu were nowhere near being ready to take on bouts of their own, but it was almost calming, still, to be in those places as a spectator and re-imbibe, as though via osmosis, all the information he had devoured as a kid about movesets, what caused a critical hit and what it meant, and how types offset each other. He thought it helped when they were on the job, too, letting him understand better his partner’s capabilities, and his own…

He keeps himself busy with these thoughts for a while, but eventually there’s nothing left to do except worry, because Pichu, though Yoshida is sure it isn’t in any real physiological danger, still isn’t waking up. Yoshida has done a few more turns around the room and found nothing on a second or third inspection, and when he lowers himself back down by Tim with a sigh Tim decides he might as well bite the bullet where it lies.

“I’m sorry we haven’t really – talked, since. Well, everything,” Tim says lamely. “I’m definitely sorry about that, sir.”

“We agreed there would be no honorifics,” Yoshida says, giving Tim a mock-scolding look from the corners of his eyes. “And no apology is required, Tim. I figured that I would wait for you to be ready to start our conversations.”

That’s different, Tim thinks. For all that his dad has proven to be a more considerate guy than he was on Pikachu-steroids, Harry’s not someone to stay quiet when something hasn’t been resolved; Tim likes the balance they have at home, the _Everything okay, kid?_ s and the little check-ins, the questions, the physical and verbal signs of care. Yoshida works otherwise, he’s realizing now, as the lieutenant sits waiting for him to reply, patiently. He offers help, talk, the walk from the DP to Harry’s apartment with the spare key he’d given to Tim – subtly, if need be, and waits for the opportunity to be taken.

“Is now a good time?” he asks, hesitantly.

“We don’t seem to have anything else to do,” Yoshida says, smiling as he gestures with a hand for Tim to begin.

“I’m – glad you’re with my dad?” Tim says, deciding that fuck it, he might as well buy into the absurdity of this whole thing; luckily for him Yoshida takes it with good grace, and just chuckles at the sheepish look on Tim’s face.

“Thank you, Tim. That means a lot to me. And I am glad to be with him too.”

“But why, though?” Tim says, relaxing into a sort of conspiratorial sarcasm, and is happy to be rewarded with a louder laugh from Yoshida.

“It is a good question. Arceus knows he has caused caused me grief,” Yoshida says, and something in Tim takes a sharp lurch sideways.

“He said once that he hurt everyone he got close to,” Tim says quietly. And then, because misery loves company or some such shit, and he’s cultivated a decent streak of dark humor over the years, he looks over at Yoshida and grins, and adds – “How did he hurt you?”

He regrets it immediately – not because Yoshida seems to take it badly (quite the opposite, in fact, as Hide’s face creases in silent thought), but because _wow, asshole, cool your jets_. His knee-jerk reaction of being disparaging about his dad, a decade in the making, seems to have survived the move to Ryme City at least somewhat intact, which kind of sucks (and which he will have to interrogate at length, later).

“Sorry,” he blurts out. “Sorry. That was completely inappropriate – ”

Yoshida holds up a quieting hand, and Tim does, feeling a blush of shame rise into his cheeks as he looks down at Pichu, strokes his soft head.

“It’s a fair question,” Yoshida says slowly, nearly startling Tim just with the sound of his voice. “I’m sure you can recognize that he had a hard few years when he first arrived here, Tim.”

“Yeah,” Tim mumbles.

“We all cope with loss in different ways, of course,” Yoshida continues, and when Tim sneaks a peek upwards at him it’s a relief to see that he’s smiling, as though remembering the shitshow that had been Tim coming to his office for the same reason. “Your dad’s method was to put himself in a great deal of danger. I can’t pretend to know what sort of feeling or experience he was searching for – and he did a lot of good work for the Department in the process – but it was not safe for him to continue living that way. I think he had forgotten what it felt like to have people care about him, or that the first step to being able to respect and care for others is to respect yourself.”

“Oh,” Tim says, feeling slightly stunned at the idea that his dad’s pseudo-death while escaping the Clifford facility might have, in some fucked-up sense, happened on purpose. “And so – you were worried for him? And he kept doing it anyway?”

“Yes, he did. To all of our benefits,” Yoshida nods, still with that small, somewhat wistful smile. “I don’t hold it against him for my sake, Tim. At that time he was not aware of the – well, of what it _meant_ when I worried about him.”

“Really?”

“Really. Except when it came to you, of course.”

“What does that mean?”

Yoshida’s face shifts again into a touch of puzzlement, which quickly resolves into understanding. “Ah – he didn’t tell you, then, that he asked me to advise you should anything happen to him before your eighteenth birthday. Not in the sense of custody, of course – he knew you were well looked-after in Leaventown – but he wanted me to take an interest in your career, to reach out should there have been anything I could do for you.”

“That’s – wow,” Tim says, blinking. “I’m… I’m glad he did that.”

“So was I,” Yoshida smiles. “And it was a great honor to be asked. I have cared for you from a distance for many years, Tim; for Harry’s sake, I would not have let that responsibility lie.”

“I was such a jerk when I first met you!”

“Understandably, of course. It was not the time, nor the place, to force my way into your life.”

They lapse into silence for a while; Tim has totally lost track of time, and with their watches and phones gone (taken, he assumes, by whomever had put them down here), there’s little way to find out. Tim shifts a little, finally, to keep his legs from falling asleep beneath him, and lets himself smile. “Thanks, sir – Hide.”

“Of course,” Yoshida says, nodding as he idly pets Snubbull’s head with a free hand. “And of course, should you want anything about my place in your life, or your father’s life, to change, you must tell me. There are boundaries that can be set whenever you want them to be.”

“I think we’re good,” Tim grins. “You should let me know what sorts of teas you’d like to have at our place. I don’t think my dad knows shit about them.”

“I would appreciate that, thank you,” Yoshida says, laughing as he shakes his head – and it’s then that there’s an almighty thump in the concrete above them. Yoshida sits bolt upright immediately, and then they both scramble to their feet; Tim, with one hand awkwardly curled under Pichu to hold him up, feels ridiculous as Yoshida splits from him and crosses to an opposite corner of the room, preparing, Tim recognizes, to get the drop on whatever might come down through the manhole-sized circle in the ceiling, which, Tim realizes with a shock, is starting to move, grinding sideways with a horrible scraping noise.

“ _Fuck_ this shit,” he hears, faintly, in very familiar tones, and then there’s a burst of electric energy which sizzles around the edge of the trapdoor, crumbling it at the sides just enough that it sinks downwards an inch before it collapses, sending up puffs of dust as it crashes to the floor in pieces.

“Tim!” Harry’s legs shoot downwards through the hole he’s created, and Tim nearly shouts out before his dad catches himself with his hands on the edge and, surprisingly gracefully, swings his way down to the ground, landing in a crouch; Pikachu had already run down his leg as he was hanging and rushes straight for Tim, climbing onto Tim’s shoulder and nuzzling his ear.

“Dad,” Tim says, and, with Pichu stirring in his arms, feels for the first time how fucking scared he’s kind of been all of this time, trapped Arceus-knows-where without knowing of rescue. Harry’s hands clamp hard around his upper arms; getting a good look at him, Tim can see that he’s in a SWAT vest which is slightly singed at one shoulder, and there’s a livid bruise rising at his hairline; above them there are suddenly vast swathes of noise echoing, the shouts of police officers and Pokémon alike as what Tim imagines must be tactical teams sweep through wherever they’ve been held.

“Tim,” Harry says again, and he looks half-wild, like his only purpose left was this moment, here. “Speak to me. Are you okay?”

“Yeah,” Tim pants, tugging Pichu in closer.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay,” Harry says, and crushes them both forward into him in a bear-hug. He smells like fire and static electricity, and Tim, seeing Yoshida approach over Harry’s shoulder, thinks he could cry.

“Harry,” Yoshida says, and Harry halfway lets go of Tim, enough that he can look behind him, and Tim watches the last of his dad’s tension visibly drain out of him at the sight of Hide safe, and Snubbull, still in a heap next to Tim, starting to smack his lips and wuffle his way awake.

“How about you?” Harry says, his words clipped and desperate.

“I’m fine, Harry.”

“Good,” Harry says, and, for the first time, he pulls Hide in in front of Tim and plants an absolute smacker of a kiss on him, his hands clutching each side of the surprised lieutenant’s face and not letting go for what Tim thinks, later, was kind of an embarrassing amount of time.

But he’s still only halfway out of a kidnapping, so in that moment, he doesn’t care. In fact, he’s fucking chuffed.

“Right,” Harry says, pushing out a harsh breath of air once he’s let go of Yoshida, who looks vaguely like a cat who has gotten into the nearest vat of cream. “We’ve got to get you both out of here. Tim, we’ll give you a boost – once you get up there, find Jim. If we need help getting ourselves out, his Chikorita can help. And if things go south, you _go_ without us, you understand? There’s a rampaging Golem up there that’s rolling everything in sight into a pancake.”

“Like in _Indiana Jones_?”

Harry’s face cracks into a grin, finally, and he’s laughing as he and Yoshida link their fingers together, creating a platform for Tim to step into. “Yeah, kid. Just like that.”

“Okay,” Tim says, and, looking down at both of them – how had he come to Ryme City and ended up with _two_ dads, anyway? – he puts his foot up into them and is launched towards the light.

*

**FIN**

*

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I didn't mean to do it again, but I have! Thanks for reading :-)


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